*sigh*

Why must there constantly be so much confusion over semantics?

The human mind is composed of atoms, and as such is a coherent pattern of energy constrained in physical form. If that pattern is duplicated, be it atom by atom, of via some as yet unknown application of physics that allows quantum duplication, so long as it is a perfect copy of the original, there should be no difference between how the copy thinks and percieves the world and how the original thinks and percieves the world. So long as the synaptic maps are identical, they are the same person.

This is true whether the copy is made from a stored record of the pattern or created dynamically from the original.

However, from the instant of copying, the experiences will vary, and if the copy is reintegrated with the original, then both experiences will reside in the neural net.

Consciousness is the dynamically running program that is being executed moment to moment on the hardware that is the brain, and that program stores information as synaptic connections, as well as utilizing that data as part of operating.

This being the case, transferral, or copying of that program is possible.

It is also the case that that program can be transferred to a different form of hardware capible of running the software, as Marvin Misky has proposed. Without loss of consciousness, transferral of the program from organic to digital hardware is possible. That we do not as yet posses the mechanism to do so is true, but the theoretical process does not present foreseeable problems…

Yet still, objections are rasied based on nothing more than Vitalism, that some force will make it impossible to make such changes.

That's a religious holdover, and it has no grounding in what is, at present, reality. I make no claims for what may be discovered once the technology is developed to make copies of the mind, it's too early yet to know for sure what all will be needed, but to argue it's impossible based only on the religious belief in "souls" is not very logical.

Yes, an engineer can get away with a low cost, low quality design, but only in the absence of competitive pressure. Free-market competition ensures that the customer always gets the best quality products for the lowest price, resulting financial gain being based on improving people's lives, not reducing them. Free-market capitalism is a win-win game.

What is the point of your comment. What I mean to say this that blind pursuit of financial gain can be ruinous at a social level when people make money out of producing things of low quality. Perhaps you fail to appreciate my perspective.

In the context of engineers, it is relevant in product design when low cost products of low quality make life worse for other people. Sometimes low cost products are pursued because they return more money for the engineer. So the happy engineer has more money to spend on more flashy things, at the expensive of making the world a bit of a better place to live.

If I make a copy of, say, an ordinary car, that is a perfect duplicate down to the last quantum state, then there is NO difference between the original and the copy.

A car or a person, you're quite right. However, the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics tells us that it is impossible to do this without destroying the original. Anyway, no one proposes to do uploading by quantum state "teleportation." The copying processes they propose would create imperfect facsimilies, within some specified tolerances of similiarity to the original but unambiguously distinct, separate objects, not even "identical except for location."

I am an instance of a pattern of atoms.

Are you not a unique physical existence, composed of atoms?

few if any of the atoms comprising my body at present are the same actual atoms that made me up 10 years ago, but I still have a scar on my left index finger and still like chocolate ice cream.

Over time, the scar is changing and so might your taste in ice cream. The real problem here is the word "me." What does "me… 10 years ago" mean? Both the atoms and what you call the "pattern" are changing. Two unambiguous facts: 1) You are a particular physical entity which is here now. 2) There is a physical continuity over time between the person that was there then, the person that is here now, and the person that (one hopes) will be there later. "Continuity of identity" is thus a statement of biological (physical) fact. It is our nature to feel that this fact is psychologically, emotionally, morally significant to us, but it does not appear to have any other physical significance. The universe couldn't care less about our "identity."

same pattern defined in my DNA will result in an exact copy of me

I think you know better than this.

a perfect simulation of that same pattern in software

Is actually probably not possible. You could start with the DNA and make a "realistic" simulation of embryogenesis, morphogenesis, birth and life (in an artificial world), but you could not exactly simulate anyone's actual life in the real world.

my consiousness has been uploaded…. The soul… doesn't exist.

So what is this "consiousness" you are talking about? If you say, "a facsimilie of my brain has been made," I have no argument with you, but you seem to be claiming more than this. What, exactly, do you mean? If what you mean is no more than "a facsimilie of my brain," then why don't you just say that?

Semantic confusion. Is not pattern the issue here?

If I make a copy of, say, an ordinary car, that is a perfect duplicate down to the last quantum state, then there is NO difference between the original and the copy – the are the same thing, and there is no way, *within themselves* not even in principle, that you can differentiate them. Of course the 2 instances of the car might occupy different parts of space and time, but they are the same object by any conceivable system of measurement you care to apply.

I am an instance of a pattern of atoms. I know this because few if any of the atoms comprising my body at present are the same actual atoms that made me up 10 years ago, but I still have a scar on my left index finger and still like chocolate ice cream. Accurately re-arranging a pile of soggy organic matter into the same pattern defined in my DNA will result in an exact copy of me, i.e. the same thing. So a perfect simulation of that same pattern in software results in an information-processing pattern that is me in software, i.e. my consiousness has been uploaded.

The soul is, like the lumniferous aether, irrelevant to the discussion, because it doesn't exist.

When you get married, you will come to understand the many benefits of financial gain, not to mention its positive impact on "quality of life".

An important comment needed in order to bring increased self awareness and scrunity to those developing new technologies, but somewhat flawed due to its limited scope.

For added realism, there are many people in all dimensions of society making important decisions that affect daily lives. What about content programming and selection in mass media ? What about politics, law enforcement and social activities ? In all of these fields, there are also "hired guns" that have less of a social conscience and more of a concern for the money they are earning. And I will not even start on the financial industry, where a superstar derivatives trader lives in lavish luxury while devestating raw materials prices across continents and making it difficult for peoples in developed worlds to come up the quality of live curve. But these too are difficult ethical and moral points that ultimately I find futile and resigned to not understanding.

Ethical and moral concerns need to be addressed in relevant context at all different levels. Technologies are often ethically and morally neutral, although they lean in different directions (nuclear power has more potential for damage [and benefit] than advanced agricultural machinary, although the former operates as a more abstract level of reality and therefore could be expected to have a more fundamental impact on reality – risks are somehow proportional to the basic level of reality at which they are considered, if that makes sense).

Hired gun programmers may not need to be aware of issues of human risk if their operating context is only software – they do need to be aware of software risks: somehow the idea is "be aware of your context, and do responsible justice to it" in the guise of "think globally, act locally". Hired gun project managers can be considered in a similar vein. However, hired gun systems engineers may need an enhanced awareness of human risk, considering that humans are a part of the context of the system and that is where the responsibility lies. Here the train of impact and responsibility intersects with the rest of the world.

However, how do you address the role of the financiers and those who fund or otherwise instigate projects – are they morally or ethnically blind ? They also need a conscience about the higher level impact, but there is tension with the engineers. In an better society, the businessmen, politicians and other people operating at a "heightened social context" would be aware of all these things.

Unfortunately, technology has illustrated the rise of a greedy side of capitalism that views financial gain as the be all and end all, and justifies financial gain as morally and ethically neutral, and any consideration of "morality and ethics" as a "beauty contest". This is part of a much more complex debate that I certainly cannot do justice to, and I only hope that other people can, for the practical reason that while life extension technologies are amiable and desirable, they are eventually pointless if the quality of life we can look forward to is miserable. And like the author, I can only raise the point and be somewhat provocative as a way of bringing up the level of debate.

Think of it like copying a program on the computer. The two copies of it are the same

What do you mean by this? They are not the same copy. One is one copy, the other is the other. You have an operational definition of "sameness," but does mean that 1+1=1?

running either one results in the same thing.

This is true for identical (in the operational sense) digital computers running identical (itos) programs, but it will never be true for any two physical brains, even if they were identical down to the last molecular bond specification at tzero.

It will not be a facsimile: it will be the same thing.

If I make one Pentium chip, it is one thing. If I make two of them, how many things is that? One is a facsimilie of the other; they are not identical, but they both conform, within tolerances, to some common specification. If I make a million of them, is that still only one thing? You might as well say all humans are the same, since we do all conform to some common specification (with relatively wide tolerance bands).

The only way that this could not be true is if there is some kind of soul or other supernatural object involved.

Do pentiums (pentia?) have souls? It seems to me that the claim that a facsimilie of a person is the person could only be true if some supernatural entity (soul) denoting the essence of that person had been transferred to the fax. Discussions of "uploading" commonly use words like "brain pattern" or "identity" or "YOU" in order to indicate the idea of this ineffable essence. The word "soul" will do just as well.

actual scanning process is not yet known… but I'm sure there will eventually be some technology to get us there.

A nice declaration of your religious faith. I'm not so sure; I'm currently working on a paper on this topic and if anyone has any references or info on proposed uploading schemes I'd be very interested.

"Yes, the creation of some kind of facsimilie. If the original has been destroyed, the person has been killed. If not, the person is stilll alive, but we have this other thing that has been created."

Think of it like copying a program on the computer. The two copies of it are the same (so long as no errors arise in the copying, which could happen in uploaded, generating the need for multiple scans and verification to eliminate 99.999…% of all errors), and running either one results in the same thing. If your brain were frozen in time, a copy of it could be made and that copy would run just like the original one. It will not be a facsimile: it will be the same thing. The only way that this could not be true is if there is some kind of soul or other supernatural object involved.

Now, the actual scanning process is not yet known and what will be involved, since congnitive science is still pretty young and we don't know that much about how the brain works. So, just mapping out the brain may not be enough, but I'm sure there will eventually be some technology to get us there.

"No, they'll look at your "backup" like it has lizards crawling out of its ears (whether or not it has ears)."

So do you mean that we won't have good cloning technology? That the physical generation of backups will result only in 'ugly' people? I think that it is a bit early to make such judgements, considering how early we are the the stages of developing such technology. If your reference is to the fact that it won't really be you, see above.

" So you do acknowledge some sort of universal standards, but I am troubled by the phrase "just a plain human"… does this imply that a fancy human would not be bound by such standards?"

Yes. I believe in natural law theory, so different species have different natural laws to adhere to (for example, some animals practice canabilism, but most humans don't because we realize that we are alive and that killing other humans is usually not to our benefit). As you will notice, animals that know that they are alive generally don't kill anything else that knows it's alive except under extreme circumstances (like when defending one's own life). This should hold true for trans and post humans, plus AIs. If it doesn't, then maybe I need to look for a new theory to explain social behavior.

This brings up your next question:

"What is the meaning of "benefit"?"

A benefit is a positive effect. The use of the word net is also important. Something that gives a person pleasure has a gross benefit, but not necessarily a net benefit, as the act may be a Nazi killing thousands of Jews, which has a net negative effect, since the value of the people killed is much higher than that of a Nazi's pleasure (since we're all humans, judging one persons pleasure to be worth more than other's life is not possible, since natural laws work on equality).

The problem is always deciding what is a net benefit and what is not. This is why morals make our society so complex and ridden with problems, because morals make it okay to do something that would have a negative net effect from an objective standpoint but a positive one from behind morals (think of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis, etc.).

"I don't have the power to stop you from doing anything, but society can and (I hope) will act to prevent the creation of threats to human survival. In the meantime, I will try to coax you into thinking a bit."

That's just it. From your point of view, lots of things are threats, but to me, there are only risks on the road to the Singularity (and whatever tech might lie beyond that horizon).

Becoming machines does not mean turning into cold, personalityless computers, but creating an intelligence in the computer that is of ourselves.

The claim is that it would be one's self. But that is nonsense.

Whether done one neuron at a time or all at once, the upload process is the same

Yes, the creation of some kind of facsimilie. If the original has been destroyed, the person has been killed. If not, the person is stilll alive, but we have this other thing that has been created.

Okay, when you and I die in a plane crash, I'll be sure to tell your family that I tried to get to make a back up before the flight, but that you refused. They'll be pretty sad that you didn't care enough about them to make a simple back up in case something went wrong.

No, they'll look at your "backup" like it has lizards crawling out of its ears (whether or not it has ears).

people are only is despair if they hold the same vision of the future that you do

I am not in despair. I see danger ahead, not doom.

Morals, as far as I'm concerned, don't even exist

I don't believe in Plato's garden either, but certain theorems of mathematics are true, while 2+2=5 is false. The same may be said of moral propositions.

or rather they do, but only in a relative sense, in that people make up their own morals…

So you would agree, then, that it's okay for the Taliban to oppress women, or anyway, no one can tell them it's wrong? Slavery should be okay, too, as long as slavers make up their own morals?

But I see you don't really believe that:

…which has little to do with how they should act as just a plain human

So you do acknowledge some sort of universal standards, but I am troubled by the phrase "just a plain human"… does this imply that a fancy human would not be bound by such standards?

The meaning of life has been found: do whatever gives you the greatest net benefit.

What is the meaning of "benefit"?

at least you are willing to let us do whatever we want

I don't have the power to stop you from doing anything, but society can and (I hope) will act to prevent the creation of threats to human survival. In the meantime, I will try to coax you into thinking a bit.